Saving Tuna Street: A Blanche Murninghan Mystery

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

Overview

Blanche “Bang” Murninghan is a part-time journalist with writer’s block and a penchant for walking the beach on her beloved Santa Maria Island. Gran left her a cabin on Tuna Street, and she’s got her friends and family—her itinerant cousin, Jack, and Cap, a lovable old fisherman who coddles her like a grandfather, and her friend, Liza, a realtor who looks like she emerged from central casting. All is well. Until the land-grabbing goons arrive from Chicago. Blanche finds herself in a tailspin, flabbergasted that so many things can go so wrong, so fast. Her friend, Bob Blankenship, Liza’s partner, is found murdered in the parking lot of the marina, and she suspects the slick, handsome land developer Sergi Langstrom and his company of chaos are behind it all. Blanche keeps digging. All the way to hell. The goons, it seems, are a front for a drug cartel.The harder Blanche pushes against the source of trouble, the more she is sucked into the vortex of greed, murder, drug runners, and kidnapping (hers). The appearance of the mysterious Haasi, a tiny Native American with glossy braids and dark eyes, complicates things, and it’s a good thing. She appears and disappears but always ends up at Blanche’s side. They all keep getting closer to the sources of the spurious land development and the murder and the drug running. Who can look away? It’s like watching a hurricane, which, literally, comes straight for Tuna Street.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611533309
Publisher:	Light Messages Publishing
Publication date:	06/23/2020
Series:	A Blanche Murninghan Mystery Series , #1
Pages:	242
Sales rank:	434,358
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Nancy Nau Sullivan began writing wavy lines at age six, thinking it was the beginning of her first novel. It wasn’t. But she didn’t stop writing, letters at first, then eight years of newspaper work in high school and college, in editorial posts at New York magazines, and for newspapers throughout the Midwest. She has a master’s in journalism from Marquette University. Nancy grew up outside Chicago but often visited Anna Maria Island, Florida. She returned there with her family and wrote an award-winning memoir THE LAST CADILLAC (Walrus 2016) about the years she cared for her father while the kids were still at home—a harrowing adventure of travel, health issues, adolescent angst, with a hurricane thrown in for good measure. She went back to the setting for the first in her mystery series, SAVING TUNA STREET, creating the fictional Santa Maria Island where Blanche “Bang” Murninghan fends off drug-running land grabbers and solves the murder of her friend with the help of her Native American accomplice, Haasi. Blanche has feet of sand and will be off to Mexico, Argentina, and Spain for further mayhem in the series. But she always returns to Santa Maria Island. Nancy, for the most part, lives in Northwest Indiana. Find her at www.nancynausullivan.com, on Facebook, and Twitter @NauSullivan.

Editorial Reviews

"The chosen family dynamics of island life are a highlight of the cozy mystery Saving Tuna Street, and greedy profiteers are its villains." —Foreword Reviews


"It’s Blanche alone who puts the bang in the book, and her debut should make readers sit up and take notice. A welcome newcomer to the South Florida genre." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2020-04-13
Developers upend the life of a feisty Gulf Coast native.

There’s a reason Blanche Murninghan’s cousin Jack calls her “Bang.” When she gets mad, it’s an event to rival a Santa Maria Island sunset—and it happens about as often. Right now, her irritation has two distinct sources. First, shady entrepreneur Sergi Langstrom is taking his dog-and-pony show to town hall, trying to persuade the islanders that the pink-and-turquoise mall and designer homes his company plans to build will increase the value of their more modest properties. The last thing Blanche wants is overscaled monstrosities crowding her shorefront cabin on Tuna Street, where she lived with her grandma Maeve after her mother’s death and where she continues to live even after Maeve’s passing—and she doesn’t mind looking Sergi in his Bradley Cooper blue eyes to tell him so. But even as she fulminates over Sergi’s machinations, a second blow falls. Bob Blankenship is found in his car with a broken neck. Blanche teams up with Liza Kramer, Bob’s partner in Sunny Sands Realty, to see who might have had it in for her longtime friend. She also seeks solace from her grandma’s former beau, Donald Nicholas “Cap” Reid. Cousin Jack, now headquartered in Chicago, makes a timely reappearance. And Blanche meets Haasi, a young Miccosukee woman who seems to live everywhere and nowhere and who teaches Blanche to listen in a whole new way. Sullivan gives a lively bunch of players their due, but when the narrative strays from Blanche, her incandescent prose flickers. It’s Blanche alone who puts the bang in the book, and her debut should make readers sit up and take notice.

A welcome newcomer to the South Florida genre.

Kirkus Reviews